Perspective on the Business of Event Processing

April 2010

April 21, 2010

On Wednesday StreamBase announced version 6.6 at TradeTech
in London. The focus of this new release of StreamBase reflects the growth of
CEP and the fact that firms are developing applications with larger teams and
extending participation to business users who want to work collaboratively with
IT on CEP-based development. And, as always, our improvements aren’t all about
what you see – we continue on our never-ending pursuit of optimization and
analysis for high-performance, low-latency computing in the financial markets.

For StreamBase, a great developer experience results in a
great company, so we take usability seriously. StreamBase already famously
enables developers, quants, analysts, and traders to
work together in one powerful “whiteboard programming” environment, and the
latest version of StreamBase helps bring that vision one step closer to reality
with StreamSQL EventFlow interfaces and extension points.

Interfaces and Extension Pointsdefine a specification for
an extensible StreamBase module and containing application. Other team members
or indeed business users that reside outside the purview of IT, can implement
StreamBase logic independently according to the interface, and easily integrate
that logic into the application.

Interfaces in Version 6.6 provide the benefit of
encapsulation and help users easily define a programming interface (inputs and
outputs, and so on) that another developer can code to without knowing the
underlying implementation.

Extension points build on interfaces by defining
a region where multiple StreamBase modules can drop in that match the same
interface, and the code can decide to dispatch to any of these modules at
runtime.

For example, interfaces and extension points make it easy for
quants to design their own trading algorithms that then snap in to a
highly tuned, scalable and bullet-proof trading infrastructure that
aggregate high-speed feeds and execute trades quickly via low-latency
connections to brokers. So, the high-speed, low latency parts of the
application are built by IT, but traders can develop,
customize, and evolve innovative trading algorithms by using
interfaces and extension points.

StreamBase 6.6 doesn’t just make it easier for the enterprise to
build CEP applications, it make it easier to test that what’s
developed is correct. We have been adding unit testing features since
Version 6.0, and in Version 6.6 sbunit is introduced –
which is a
new unit
testing facility which extends and integrates with
the standard Java-based JUnit system.

Using sbunit, developers can build test fixtures to
backtest, performance test, force error conditions, and otherwise probe an
application for bugs. These test fixtures can be shared with quants and
analysts. By running sbunit tests automatically, teams can pinpoint when bugs
are introduced, and keep projects moving.

StreamBase is well-known as the fastest CEP platform in the market
– it is constant work to maintain that performance edge as customers
require more features and the demands for microsecond-level latency
increase. To help customers maximize throughput and
minimize latency, 6.6 brings many new features around dispatching and
concurrency. Applications can now specify per-stream
data dispatch patterns, and integrate dispatch patterns with extension
points, so that data is processed by only the modules that require
it. To minimize latency, dispatch patterns do not require thread
context switches. And the performance of data passing between
StreamBase compute threads has been enhanced.

Finally, with all these improvements for our enterprise
customers, we’ve also provided integrated support for our growing network of
StreamBase developers with studio support for the StreamBase Component
Exchange, SBX. SBX allows
anyone using StreamBase to download open source components. The exchange
includes adapters, algorithms, integrations, and utilities, all available on SBX
website. Version 6.6 adds integration of SBX into the StreamBase Studio. SBX
components form an extension of the standard StreamBase palette, saving work
for developers and accelerating time to market.

April 05, 2010

SunGard is one of the biggest names in the capital markets, so when they announce a corporate software selection, it's important news.

SunGard's VP of Liquidity Services, Chris Lees told Securities and Industry News: "One of the reasons why we thought about a CEP [is because] we were looking to make real-time decisions on what is effectively streaming data. CEP processing is very adapted to that space." He described why the SunGard selection demonstrates that CEP is going mainstream, from algo trading to dozens of applications, to trade equities, futures, fixed income and options. The platform will be used by SunGard's Assent Liquidity Services, which provides sponsored access, dark pool access and algorithmic trading services, and in conjunction with its Brass Order Management System (OMS). With over $3B in revenue and 20,000 customers in over 50 countries, SunGard is big, and they join RBC, City Index, CMC Markets, CME Group, PhaseCapital, BlueCrest, and others who have made the leap to CEP.

The authoring, testing, and debugging environment — StreamBase Studio — isn't just a graphical modeling tool (e.g., UML), and it's not just a code generation tool (e.g., Apama) — it's a complete, native, unified graphical programming environment. It's not just a modeling tool, it's not a code generation front-end. What you see is what you get.The best way we've been able to
describe it is as "whiteboard programming."

Every StreamBase customer uses this pure visual programming, and it's a new way of working because you generate applications more quickly, without sacrificing performance. And because there is no generated code, it's easier to maintain.

The SunGard / StreamBase partnership was covered broadly, but there were a few angles, as usual, reported that my original post didn't highlight, including:

SunGard to build pre-trade risk tool on StreamBase

The Trade reported that SunGard will focus on developing pre-trade risk controls with StreamBase, a decision that was "prompted in part by the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to require brokers offering clients direct access to exchanges, including sponsored access, to impose pre-trade risk checks."

They reported that pre-trade risk controls would involve validating incoming orders against market data, for example, to check for errors or anomalies. “You end up with a requirement for completing quite a complex set of calculations in a very short window of time, because you don’t want to delay getting the order to the market while using a lot of streaming data,” Chris Lees, vice president of liquidity services at SunGard, told theTRADEnews.com. “For us, that is the perfect sweet-spot for StreamBase’s event processing platform.”

My remarks in the comments below stand, and I would add that if you compare StreamBase as a platform to the relational database, you see why its a good thing when an industry establishes a defacto platform. The business fuels the innovation and maturity of the leader, and all participants benefit. SunGard, and our many other customers, begin to compete on the efficacy of their use of the CEP platform, not just the fact that they are using it.